Wow. Three top notch reponses to my little theorem. Props to
barryp, Pseudonym, and especially schoen. In case anyone was
wondering I wasn't trying to get you to do my homework. I
haven't done homework in years... perhaps if I were
doing homework my math wouldn't be so rusty.

I took a lot of math classes in college, some calculus, and
statistics, and discrete math thru the computer science
department. I did well in most of them, but when it comes to
real world application my math skills seem so feeble. It's
like I know enough math to want to prove my ideas
but not enough math to actually get the job done.

For instance, how did you guys know log(256^n) was the way
to get the maximum number of symbols in an encoding? In my
first attempts at a proof I had a function maxlength(n) but
I didn't know how to break that function into mathematical
elements to reach a QED.